Citizen scientist: Out of the lab and onto the streets

With a bit of spare time, community labs and the power of the internet, anyone can do science on their own terms

"Mass participation could change what we understand about ourselves" (Image: Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images)

FOR most of human history, there were two reasons why people tinkered with the natural world: to stay alive (or live better); or to satisfy their curiosity. From farming and building to dropping balls from towers and creating telescopes, these endeavours sowed the seeds for science as we now know it.

Over the centuries, science became institutionalised. At first, though, there was plenty of room for the unaffiliated amateur – the likes of Darwin or Einstein. But eventually, firm boundaries were established: inside were professional scientists, outside were... who exactly? Amateurs. And over time those enthusiasts logging newts in muddy notebooks, scouring beaches for fossils, or mixing concoctions in their garden sheds, came to be seen as lone eccentrics.

But now there's a revolution going on. All you need is a bit of spare time, and stable telecommunications. Millions of us have access to swathes of scientific information thanks to the internet, open-access publishing and servers dishing up drafts of scientific papers before they are formally published, with or without peer review.

Factor in the web 2.0 ethos of self-organisation plus the power of the crowd, and you have all sorts of people in all sorts of places pursuing science as never before. This comes in many flavours – citizen scientists, DIY scientists, makers and hackers. And all of them are fascinated by science and they won't be denied their place at the world's intellectual feast.

One of the most obvious examples of citizen science is crowdsourced analysis. Take Galaxy Zoo. This was set up by astronomers in 2007 to help sift and categorise over a million astronomical images online. A few years ago, a Dutch teacher taking part discovered a new type of quasar, the Hanny's Voorwerp. She became one of a handful of citizen scientists to be named alongside professional scientists on an academic paper detailing a scientific discovery.

Following a similar model, in October last year, Cancer Research UK invited the public to get involved in beating cancer on the CellSlider website – the product of a 48-hour hackathon. After a brief training, the participants spot and note the number and type of cancer cells present. They have already categorised millions of images from breast cancer patients. Each image passes in front of many eyes to ensure accuracy.

Aside from sorting raw data and turning it into useful information, mass participation can help us collect desperately needed big data from hard-to-reach places. Amazingly, the number of websites offering the chance to catalogue biodiversity is in the hundreds, from Big Garden Birdwatch run by the UK's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds to monitoring tigers in India.

And it's getting more and more sophisticated. The Zoological Society of London's iBats project, for example, now has an app that grabs bat sounds using your smartphone's microphone, tags them to the location – and provides a species name. Then there are projects that allow indigenous people, such as pygmy tribes living in the Republic of the Congo, to map local biodiversity.

Sometimes the participants are also the guinea pigs. For example, a project for the BMW Guggenheim Lab, directed by cognitive psychologist Colin Ellard, sets out to collect physiological data from people as they wandered major world cities, starting in New York. It aims to discover emotional responses to different stimuli.

Getting people involved on a massive scale could really change our understanding of ourselves, says Steve Swithenby of the Open University's OpenScience lab. Since most subjects in psychological tests are university students, he worries that the way we understand the brain may be skewed by a demographic which represents only a tiny part of the whole population. If we move to online testing, he expects we can involve thousands of people – a far more representative sample.

This is also the thinking behind The Great Brain Experiment, an app launched this March by the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in London, that has "gamified" research. "Real" scientists capture swathes of facts and figures about memory, impulsivity, attention and decision-making, while you are having fun playing games. Not too surprisingly, the app has more than 32,450 users.

There are self-organised efforts, too, as individuals log details about their own health, which are then fastidiously collected into Quantified Self projects. Such projects can help highlight unforeseen trends. For example, the CureTogether website discovered that a subset of migraine sufferers were three times more likely to experience side effects when they took the migraine medication Imitrex.

Fab Labs

But it's not about all big data or fun online. This kind of public involvement underlines how much science can benefit from recognising the value of inventive and interested enthusiasts. When you apply the self-organising and innovative hacker mentality to scientific research as well, something new appears: the self-styled DIY scientist.

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